By Your Side

In this ever changing educational landscape, ATI remains dedicated to continue an unwavering track record of technological innovations that began in 1986 and that support educational initiatives. A recent major change in the educational landscape was the June 2, 2010 release for state adoption of Common Core State Standards. In order to support and help facilitate the goals of school districts in transitioning toward the full implementation of Common Core Standards, ATI has been actively engaged in continuous assessment innovations, content development, reporting innovations, research, and professional development activities. Assessment item innovations include performance based and technology enhanced item types for assessing Common Core skills.

Another recent and major change in the educational landscape is the emphasis on instructional effectiveness. Instructional effectiveness mandates across the country tend to contain requirements for inclusion of reliable and valid measurement of student growth, documentation of teacher and administrator skills, and a reporting mechanism for this data that provides a single score for each educator. In order to support and help facilitate the goals of school districts in meeting instructional effectiveness guidelines, ATI has been developing technology to compile categorical data in a manner that provides a single score for each educator. Two years ago, ATI began the development of instructional effectiveness tools. One example can be found in the secure pretest and posttest offerings for language arts and mathematics. This part of the initiative was provided as a pilot to a large group of districts during the 2011-2012 academic year. The pilot was very successful and proved capable of providing districts with tools to measure student growth in these two areas with reliable and valid assessments. The tools will be available to all clients for the upcoming academic year. Another component of the ATI instructional effectiveness initiative is the Community Item Banking and Assessment Development Project. This project is a way for districts to develop and share assessment items and assessments for non-state-tested subjects and grade levels. Participating districts in the project are provided technology, services, and professional development related to item writing. ATI is also providing supporting technology and expert services related to assessment development in addition to conducting data analyses to establish psychometric properties of items and to evaluate the validity, reliability, and fairness of the resulting assessments. Participating districts are being provided access to a continually growing repository of shared district-written, high-quality items and customized assessments in areas not currently addressed on statewide tests.

With ATI staff by your side, you will receive a full instructional improvement system continually evolving in response to changing federal and state requirements, client needs, ongoing research in educational assessment and instruction, and advances in technology.